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Comment by ericlewis | Hacker News Reader

Not that it really matters I guess, but electron apps are chunky. Huge bin size and large memory usage.

were talking about a tiny desktop app that wraps ffmpeg CLI. this is the perfect use case for it, over, say, VISUAL STUDIO CODE.

I actually think VSCode is one of the best use cases for Electron. It enables a robust and well-documented set of APIs for extension and theme developers, which IMO is why it has one of the most thriving extension ecosystems out there.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not in Developer Division.

> It enables a robust and well-documented set of APIs for extension and theme developers

Didn't VIM and Emacs have that for ages? Look at https://vimawesome.com/. I think the remote development extension is nice, but most people would just SSH and run their editor on the server or sync their project's files.

The Emacs APIs aren't exactly robust in the modern sense. They don't have the security and privilege isolation that VS Code's TypeScript APIs have.

The perfect use case for a massive incredibly complex browser runtime is...a tiny desktop app? What?

Do you as a user seriously want a 400MB binary that takes up 1 GB of memory at least just to have a sluggish interface to run a command line program for you when it could be an instant GUI that takes up 1 MB of memory ?

Why would anyone want something taking up literally 1000x the resources it needs to?

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